Tuesday, January 1, 2013

FACEBOOK OPTIMIST

Bowing to the inevitable reality that Facebook interconnects one-sixth of humanity, Eternal Optimist has opened a (very conservative) Facebook page. Obviously he was not able to accomplish this on his own. Rather, a talented consultant of tender years helped him negotiate the intricacies of opening a new account.

How lovely that the young are willing to share their wisdom with the old! It makes me optimistic.

I am also optimistic that after years and years of economic and political turmoil, America will eventually sober up and realize that it cannot fund entitlements and government programs forever via the issuance of debt. It appears right now America is of two minds on the subject, and this is likely to go on for a long time.

Anyone not a union president acknowledges that our entitlement programs are on the road to bankruptcy and have to be reformed. Anyone not a union president has to be uneasy at 1 billion a year in annual deficits, funded by endless debt issued by the Federal Reserve and Treasury.

I am sure Mr. Obama recognizes both truths. He is not overly concerned, since he is confident that he can successfully blame
Republicans for tax increases and spending cuts that he agreed to a few
years ago.

Mr. Obama's plan to fix entitlement deficits: ignore them and they will go away.

Mr. Obama's plan to fix current annual deficits: ignore them and they will go away.

Mr. Obama's plan, as I understand it: if we tax rich people and keep issuing lots of debt, somewhere along the line we will have an economic recovery based on wind and solar power and everything will fix itself.

Thankfully, Mr. Obama has been predicting economic recovery since 2008. At some point, I suppose, he will be right, although whether that point arrives in the next 4 years I am not sure.

In the meantime, Eternal Optimist is confident that we could trim the budget, begin fixing entitlement funding, and not cause an economic catastrophe. Mr. Obama, and 52% of America, disagree. So we won't do it anytime soon. Simple as that.

[Caveat: at this point, since I have disagreed with Mr. Obama, I will have been called an elitist, a racist, a fascist and possibly a warmonger. This is a verbal tic that passes for debate among some of my Obamaista friends. I am none of the above.]

The Republicans must feel like they are negotiating with the Palestinians, whose idea of good faith is to demand that you submit to genocide and then blame you for unreasonably breaking off negotiations.
All of this was easily predictable. The Obama Administration is just Chicago machine politics writ large. The Machine is good at winning elections, but bad at governing. To study our fate as a nation, study the City of Chicago and State of Illinois.

2 comments:

Your last line about Chicago as a model for America was particularly touching. As I understand it some 500 hundred murders occurred in South Chicago last year plus 2400 shooting casualties. Just that section of Chicago is more dangerous for Americans than Afghanistan. SRF

This quote from the NY Times on Illinois' horrendous debt problems and the impact on its people:

"For years, Illinois has racked up billions in public debt to plug budget holes, pay overdue bills, and put money into its mismanaged pension funds. And for the people who live there, this has resulted in decrepit commuter trains and buses, thousands of unsound bridges, 200 hazardous dams and one of the most inequitable public school systems in America."

Illinois is Mr. Obama's resume. To find out where we are going, read about Illinois government finances in a NY Times article:

Followers

QUOTES

"I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else." Winston Churchill

"Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures." St. Thomas Aquinas

"If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Albert Einstein

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper." George Orwell

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Samuel Johnson

"He chewed more than he bit off." Ernest Hemingway, on Henry James

"Progress, not perfection." Stuart Smalley

"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." Abraham Lincoln

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner. " Samuel Johnson

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." Mark Twain

"Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding." Jonathan Swift

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Abraham Lincoln

"It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop." Confucius

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." Winston Churchill

"A coward is incapable of exhibiting love. It is the prerogative of the brave." Mohandas Gandhi

"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Otto von Bismarck

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." C.S. Lewis

"A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one." Benjamin Franklin

"On the day of judgment, we will not be asked what we have read, but what we have done." Thomas a Kempis

"Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections . . . have patience in all things, but first of all, yourself." St. Francis de Sales

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." Edmund Burke

"It is impossible for a Cynic, who makes indifference his end, to know any good but indifference." Justin Martyr

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P.J. O'Rourke